Touch, Sky1: What Kiefer Sutherland did next

A global star thanks to action series '24’, Kiefer Sutherland is back on
television – sooner than planned, and exploring gentler dramatic territory.
Jane Mulkerrins meets him.

Sensitive: Martin Bohm (Kiefer Sutherland) and Jake (David Mazouz) in new series Touch.

By Jane Mulkerrins

7:00AM GMT 20 Mar 2012

Kiefer Sutherland wasn’t looking for another television role. And after 192 episodes of assiduously saving the world as counter-terrorism agent Jack Bauer in 24, who could blame him? But then the script for Touch arrived.

“By the time I got to page 35, I thought, 'S---, I’m in real trouble here,’” he says. “This wasn’t something that I wanted to just sit and watch at home. It was something I would regret not taking part in.”

The drama, which begins on Sky1 later this month, sees Sutherland playing Martin Bohm, a man whose wife dies in the attack on the Twin Towers, prompting him to leave his job to care for his 11-year-old son Jake (David Mazouz). Jake is seemingly mute, and cannot bear to be touched, even by his own father. He is diagnosed as autistic, but is in fact, the series posits, a more evolved sort of human, with the ability to find hidden numerical patterns that link people across the globe.

Touch’s sensitive and emotional depiction of the relationship between a father and son who themselves struggle to connect may surprise those who tune in expecting to find Sutherland in action-hero mode. But, for the actor, the surprise was being offered a television series of this quality quite so soon.

“Most people, knowing that I had just come off eight years of 24, didn’t send me any television scripts, because they assumed – and they were correct – that I was not going to rush back into that sort of commitment,” he says.

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His CV boasts more than 70 films, including Stand By Me (his breakthrough at 19), as well as The Lost Boys, Flatliners and Young Guns. Yet it was the critically acclaimed 24 that brought Sutherland international stardom, along with an Emmy Award, a Golden Globe and two Screen Actors Guild gongs.

But after foiling his final terrorist plot in May 2010, the 45-year-old actor had been enjoying other, varied opportunities on stage and screen, including Lars von Trier’s Melancholia with Kirsten Dunst, and a six-month stint on Broadway in That Championship Season – until Touch came along.

I meet him in a hotel in Los Angeles, where the series, though set in New York, is shot. In person he is ruggedly handsome and lean, youthfully dressed in denim – and strikingly animated.

“I can barely remember what it was like making the first season of 24, it’s a blur,” he says. “I’d forgotten how exciting that first year of a show is, when you’re making big decisions that will have profound effects on the rest of the show, however many seasons it goes to.”

Touch was created by Tim Kring, the veteran screenwriter behind the BBC’s hit US import Heroes. It takes inspiration from both his own relationship with his autistic son and also from Chinese folklore.

“The Chinese fable, which Tim has borrowed, says that everybody who is supposed to come into contact with each other over the course of a lifetime is connected by a red thread wrapped around their ankle,” explains Sutherland. “There’s something wonderfully comforting about thinking that everything, however innocuous it seems, has a purpose – that the choice to get on a bus or not will have an effect on the other people on the bus, and on the kerb.

“The red thread can’t snap; it can bend, but it can’t break.” But then he adds, with a touch of philosophical melancholy, “but somehow, in our world, we have broken it”.

Aside from a suicide-bomb threat in the first episode, Touch has a gentler tone than 24. “The character and the tone were so vastly different, that was its appeal,” Sutherland says.

Bauer and Bohm do share one thing, he concedes: desperation. “Jack Bauer was confronted with a series of circumstances which were insurmountable,” he says. “Martin has a son with whom he is never going to be able to have the quintessential father-son relationship. And so he is also carrying a weight, fighting a fight which he can’t entirely win, but in a very different way.

“A constant reality for Martin is his sense of failure as a parent, as if somehow he’s responsible for where his son is at. That is something I certainly responded to as a parent myself.”

Kiefer’s own parents – actors Donald Sutherland and Shirley Douglas – divorced when he and his twin sister Rachel were five years old, and he grew up with his mother in Toronto. “I have a very, very close relationship with my father now,” he says.

The family acting business is being further continued by Kiefer’s 24-year-old actress daughter Sarah, from his first marriage to Carmelia Kath, who recently graduated from the esteemed Tisch School of the Arts. Kiefer also happily refers to himself as a grandparent, and has called his two grandsons (technically step-grandsons), the children of Kath’s older daughter, Michelle, his “greatest joy”.

But Sutherland is as far from the idea of a grandfather as one could imagine. Brimming with brio, he is neither ready for a pipe and slippers nor, happily, to quite retire Jack Bauer’s FBI badge.

“We are hoping to start shooting the 24 film in April or May,” he confirms, although since our meeting production of the film has been put on hold. While the red thread is being put back together, our interconnected world still needs saving, after all.